Chapter Fifteen
Otis came out of his house and crossed the yard to where Boyd Crowder and some coal company man in a suit of clothes were looking at Otis’s fishpond: the pond down to barely a foot of water, fish floating dead in a scum of coal dust.
“You know how many years,” Otis said, “it took me to dig this pond, get it to look how I wanted? Stock it with channel cat, bluegill, some shiners? My grandkids used to come over and fish for the fun of it. Hook ’em and throw ’em back.”
Boyd said, “I bet less anybody was hungry. Otis, me and Mr. Gracie here are with M-T Mining? We go out to hear there any complaints. Folks in the hollers bitchin about debris coming down where we been stripping coal.”
Mr. Gracie said, still looking at the dead pond, “All the rocks and soil once the coal’s washed out, it’s got to go somewheres.”
“You don’t care it’s full of acid,” Otis said. “It kilt the stream fed my pond and now all my fish are belly up.”
He watched Mr. Gracie squat down at the edge of the pool, Mr. Gracie saying, “Hey, I believe one of ’em’s still alive. Look at the little fella flippin around in there wondering where the pond went.”
Otis stepped up behind him, planted his boot against the back of Mr. Gracie’s suitcoat and pushed him to throw out his arms and go facedown in the scum-covered pond.
Otis said, “Hard to breathe in there, huh?”
Boyd stopped grinning as Otis turned to him, Boyd saying, “I don’t thin Sheang='enk you shoulda done that.”
“Forty years in mines,” Otis said, “the whole time yes-sirin these company pimps. Well, not no more.”
I n the evening Otis put supper on to boil-potatoes, turnips with greens-but first he sat with Marion while she held her robe closed tight to her chest breathing through her mouth. He gave her a couple of her OxyContins and a jelly glass of clear whiskey she’d sip on for a while. She had black lung from breathing the air, not ever having gone down a mine shaft.
He heard a bulldozer start up, a big diesel, knowing the sounds of the equipment, the dozers and draglines. The wolfhound heard it and got up off the floor. They’d blow charges and push the debris over the side from the strip job up on Looney Ridge. But this sounded close. Who was working in the dead of night?
By the time Otis heard branches breaking, rocks flying through the trees-knowing it was too late to grab Marion and run-a boulder the size of his Ford pickup came down on his house like the end of the world and the frame house gave up furniture, the walls, no way to stop the hunk of mountain crushing the floor, blowing out the front wall taking the door and windows, slowed some plowing through the flower beds, on flat ground now, and rolled into Otis’s pond to end its trip.
Marion, in her rocker holding her drink, coasting through clouds on oxy and shine, her back to the path of destruction, said to Otis, “What in the world was that?”
Otis said, “I’m gonna take you over to sister’s while I go up and see the mine company, all right? I come back, we may as well stay the night there.”
Marion watched Otis put on his worn-out suit coat over bib overalls and stuff the pockets with shotgun shells. In this moment her mind sounding clear, she said, “You finally had enough of mine companies, haven’t you?”
The M-T Mining office stood on a flat ridge shorn of trees and brush, carved away in the company’s hunger for coal. Boyd had been hosing the pond stink out of his SUV while Mr. Gracie told him what he wanted done.
“Lemme get this straight,” Boyd had said. “You want me to tip a boulder over the side and see if I can hit Otis’s house with it?”
“You can’t,” Mr. Gracie said, “I’ll get a man knows how.”
“Cause Otis shoved you in the muck,” Boyd said, “you want me to kill him?”
“I said bust up his house,” Mr. Gracie told him. “You don’t want to work Disagreements,” the most disagreeable man Boyd had ever known said, “you can hit theou up road.”
“I’m kidding with you,” Boyd said. “I don’t mind hearin people complain. They know they never gonna get what they want. They vent their ire, so to speak, and feel like they took it to the edge.”
Mr. Gracie had Boyd spread newspaper on the seat of his car, got in with his smell of muck and took off home.
Boyd said, “Pee-yew,” and went in the office trailer, a big double-wide all desks and drawing boards, no alcohol on the premises-half a pint of cheap vodka in a desk drawer, no naked girl on the calendar, nothing to make you want to work here.
This was before Otis came up the mountain.
F irst, headlights swept the trailer and a black stretch limo pulled up next to the office. Boyd watched a woman get out and he stepped to the door and opened it. He saw her talking to her driver, giving him a few words, and the limo took off. Now she turned to the trailer, in the light from the open door, and Boyd was looking at Carol Conlan, the one person everybody saw in the newspaper or on TV when the mine company had something to say. Jesus Christ, Carol Conlan coming in smiling at him, saying, “You’re Boyd, aren’t you? The one dropped the rock on the guy’s house.”
How’d she know that already? Boyd started to ask her, but Carol Conlan was talking on her cell now, telling somebody, “I’m not going to hear that, Bob. Start over and give me a report I’m sure to love, okay?” She said, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and set down her phone.
She said to Boyd, “Where is it?” Boyd pointed and watched her go in and raise her skirt as she sat down, leaving the door open. Man, Carol Conlan.
She said, “You did a job on that house.”
“Only took me the one boulder,” Boyd said. He picked up her cell from the desk and sniffed to see if it had her scent.
“I thought it was cool,” Carol said, “flip the bucket and take out the entire house. What’s the guy doing about it?”
“Otis? Nothin,” Boyd said, “he’s an old man.”
“That Mick fairy Gracie-you always call him mister?”
“It’s what he told me,” Boyd said.
“He took it much too far,” Carol said, “destroying the home when we have a public hearing coming up.”
Boyd heard the toilet flushe t up and Carol came out straightening her skirt. She said, “Now we’re the bad guys. That pond sounded like it was nice before we fucked it up.” She said, “I never liked Gracie much. I’ll have your jobs switched around and make you the boss. We have anything to drink?”
“Half a pint of vodka and all kinds of water,” Boyd said and saw the good-looking company Disagreements woman make a face and pick up her phone.
“I’ll call Brian, have him get a bottle of scotch. I hate vodka.”
Otis had shot an elk up near the summit of Big Black, the mountain covered in a forest of old pine and aspen: came on the stag so close they both jumped at the sight of each other. Otis put him down with one shot, bled him out and they had meat the whole winter. This time he followed switchbacks up the grade to what was left of Looney Ridge, the side of the mountain carved into contoured benches. They drilled holes in the rock above the veins, and blew charges to get the coal out. Otis’s house-still a thousand feet down the mountain-would shake and pictures of his dad and Marion’s kin would fall off the wall. He’d told her, “By the war, they was a hundred and thirty thousand miners diggin coal in Kentucky. Now they’s a few dozen up there scrapin it out with Cats. It ain’t like coal mining no more.”
Marion asked him what it was like and Otis said, “Livin on the goddamn moon.”
He saw the bulldozer standing at the edge of the fall line, he saw lights on inside the double-wide they used for their office, didn’t care somebody was inside counting beans, Otis stepped out of his truck racking the twelve- gauge and began blowing out the trailer’s glass. Paused and looked around at the earthmoving machines standing idle, shut down for the night. Good, he wouldn’t have to shoot anybody come yellin at him.
